Page 1 - Introduction
Wastewater Treatment plants (WWTP) are designed to remove pollutants through physical, chemical and biological processes to mitigate damage to the surrounding environment. I want to observe the types of factors influencing treatment procedures and pollutants through these three questions:
1. How do the wastewater treatment plans differ from WWTPs near the shoreline and those more inland?
2. Is there a relationship between the amount of river water discharged from a WWTP, the treatment quality and the amount of pollutants?
3. Does the river discharge have an influence on the operational status of a WWTP?
Data Cleaning: Filtering only United States WWTPs into data visualizations, reordering factor levels of wastewater treatment type, renaming WWTP coast distances and converting the coast distance data to long format.
Dataset: HydroWASTE_v10.csv
By: Connor Quiroz, California State University, Monterey BayPage 2 - Coastal WWTPs
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Primary treatment allows solids to (settle and be removed from wastewater, secondary treatment uses biological processes to further purify wastewater and advanced treatment uses new experimental techniques including filtration, carbon adsorption, distillation and reverse osmosis (EPA). Using more treatments removes more water pollutants.
Most WWTPs are further than 50kmthe coast, with <50km being the nextfrequent, and the least amount of WWTPSwithin 10km of the beach.
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As the design capacity increases for a WWTP increases, the amount of the population members served also increases.
A higher proportion of WTTPS within 50km of the coast use advanced treatment procedures than only secondary treatment.
Page 3 Freshwater WWTPs
Dilition Factor is the ratio of concentration in the effluent to concentration in the receiving water after mixing in the receiving water (USGS). Higher dilution factors are related to higher pollution levels in wastewater.
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As the treatment quality increases for each WWTP, the amount of dilution factors also increases, indicating that advanced levels of treatment remove more toxins. There are also very few data points for primary treatment, and this might be because most WWTPS operate using secondary and advanced levels of treatment and only use primary in specific circumstances.
Higher discharge rates are more frequent among WWTPs operating under secondary treatment levels
